Molly Holbrook is a dreamer who’s working feverishly to make her dreams come true.

One dream is to turn her mountain home into a self-sufficient homestead, while another involves becoming a star on FoodyTV.com. Both of those hopes are tied to Organicopia: The Total Organic Experience, the company behind Holbrook’s private chef and catering business.

“My goal was to be the next Martha Stewart by 2015, and lo and behold this is meant to be,” Holbrook said recently.

New York-based FoodyTV contacted Holbrook and asked her to shoot a pilot to run on its web channel, so the Los Gatos resident is looking for sponsors “who can benefit from my show and I can benefit from them.”

Although cross-promotion is new to Holbrook, she’s convinced that “there are a lot of people out there who can help me.”

But Holbrook needs no help whatsoever when it comes to finding her way around a kitchen.

She graduated from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in San Francisco in 2007, after she had already become a personal chef.

“In 2004 I found a private client at Google and cooked for her and her family of five,” Holbrook said. “It just evolved from there.”

Holbrook has a commercial kitchen in San Jose for large-scale catering assignments. She also caters small, high-end dinner parties and has five families that she cooks for weekly. “I go into people’s homes and cook, so I can cater to their needs and then package their food for a week–they come home, pop it in the oven and in 30 minutes it’s ready,” Holbrook said. “Last Thursday, I cooked for a family of four in Palo Alto and served Tuscan lemon chicken marinated in lemon, garlic, rosemary and oregano, served with Parmesan whipped potatoes, seasonal vegetables from the Los Gatos farmers market and a Caesar salad with homemade croutons.”

Holbrook says her meals aren’t fancy, but they’re healthy.

She charges $70 an hour, with a 2½-hour minimum. “Typically, I can prepare five meals in two hours, and that includes shopping,” she said. “My clients like simple, home-cooked food. They don’t have time to cook, so this is a cost-effective way to get their kids to eat healthy.”

Holbrook’s menus are created with freshness in mind.

“I like my job because I write my menus based on what sounds good to me at the time,” she said. “I look for seasonal freshness at farmers markets, and sometimes I even get inspired by looking at produce at the grocery store.”

She says everybody knows her at Whole Foods, and she spends a lot of time at the West Valley College and Los Gatos farmers markets.

“The vibe at Los Gatos is terrific,” Holbrook said. “I love the fresh eggs and raw milk, and the cheeses are excellent. My biggest dream is to learn how to make cheese.”

Someday, Holbrook plans to go to Europe to learn that skill, but there are other events in her life that have put cheese-making on the back burner: The 34-year-old Holbrook is 18 weeks pregnant–she and her husband Derek just found out that their first baby will be a boy.

“I dream about having my baby on my hip and selling baby food at the farmers’ market,” she said.

The baby food sales could happen as early as 2017.

Holbrook and her husband are self-described soulmates who met when she was just 12 years old and Derek was living on a farm in Linden, near Stockton.

“My grandmother would say, “This is what I’m going to cook today,’ and my grandfather would go out and pick it,” Derek said. “All the farmers swapped food–tomatoes for onions–so we never went to grocery stores.”

And that’s one reason why the self-sufficient homestead figures into the couple’s plans.

In a few weeks, Derek plans to build a chicken coop, yielding not only fresh eggs but also manure that can be spread around garden beds. “It keeps the deer away,” he said.

The Holbrook’s have 13 raised garden beds on their 1.75-acre property. “Everything grows well here–melons, squash, kale, pumpkins. We even did fingerling potatoes last summer,” Holbrook said.

As crops come in, the Holbrooks get cooking.

“It’s truly a labor of love. We start in July and we make jars and jars of tomato sauce, pesto and jam,” Holbrook said. “We also make homemade raviolis from Derek’s grandmother’s recipe; we throw flour everywhere and make hundreds at a time.”

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